Toine Spapens is full Professor of Criminology at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He specialises in research on organised drug crime, environmental crime, and cross-border enforcement cooperation.  His empirical studies include inter alia the trafficking in illicit firearms, narcotic drug production, criminal families, waste trafficking and wildlife crime. His theoretical work focuses on organised crime networks, the regulation of (former) illegal markets and multi-agency approaches to serious and organised crime problems. He contributed to the project TRACE (Trafficking as a criminal enterprise)in 2014-2015, and was project leader of IMOBEX (Improving enforcement at the intersection of mobile banditry and exploitation) in 2021-2023.